your best bet for realtime response is to make your way to IRC, #monero-dev or #monero

I've been poking around here for a while though so might be able to point you in some direction. A lot of worthwhile info can be found in the OP. And if you're talking infrastructure, meaning code, i'm sure you can have a field day with the github.

what would take a "day", would take only a few hours, with documentation

Hrm, yesh - in my reading of the monero monday missives, this lack of documentation is actually what the monero dev team has been dealing with in order to make monero what it is today (I don't have the whole list on the top of my head, because I came late into the game, but a big one for me and my 2 gig linux box is moving the 5 gig blockchain from memory into a database).

So, somewhere, there is notation. I have no idea where. You probably have to get friendly with the dev team. Again, IRC channel. Just idle in their until you see activity or someone responds.

metadata... an example?

I think something cool to develop would be a lite build of ubuntu you could plop onto a 64 gig jump drive with a built in, user friendly GUI wallet. It would sort of work like a cold wallet - whenever you want to move money into / out of your vault, you have to boot onto your liveUSB, which is probably safer.

what would take a "day", would take only a few hours, with documentation

Hrm, yesh - in my reading of the monero monday missives, this lack of documentation is actually what the monero dev team has been dealing with in order to make monero what it is today (I don't have the whole list on the top of my head, because I came late into the game, but a big one for me and my 2 gig linux box is moving the 5 gig blockchain from memory into a database).

So, somewhere, there is notation. I have no idea where. You probably have to get friendly with the dev team. Again, IRC channel. Just idle in their until you see activity or someone responds.

metadata... an example?

I think something cool to develop would be a lite build of ubuntu you could plop onto a 64 gig jump drive with a built in, user friendly GUI wallet. It would sort of work like a cold wallet - whenever you want to move money into / out of your vault, you have to boot onto your liveUSB, which is probably safer.

Again, IRC channel. Just idle in their until you see activity or someone responds.

I do. I've only recently started visiting this thread again more because they don't consistently post missives outside of here on time, I mean, reddit is an afterthought and the title of the IRC channel is as well, they don't consistently talk about the latest database binaries anywhere but here, you wouldn't even have known that there was a consortium of monero research lab people if you didn't come here and follow a clusterfuck bitcointalk thread

Again, IRC channel. Just idle in their until you see activity or someone responds.

I do. I've only recently started visiting this thread again more because they don't consistently post missives outside of here on time, I mean, reddit is an afterthought and the title of the IRC channel is as well, they don't consistently talk about the latest database binaries anywhere but here, you wouldn't even have known that there was a consortium of monero research lab people if you didn't come here and follow a clusterfuck bitcointalk thread

Something time friendly that could be splashed through between watching tv or ploughed down in a couple hours? Like this?

Though I'm a bigger fan when it was sutura and the articles were more easily gathered if you wanted a quick read through. I would think Monero couldn't support 4, but if you included I2P updates and a general article on privacy or innovation you could easily get enough to make it email worthy.

Do you follow the Bitcoin "hardfork" debate?Maybe it's just drama but I think it's quite worrying that there is no consensus.

Will we find ourselves in a similar situation with Monero in a couple of years? I guess there is a hard limit on block size now. Is it big enough to support a large network? If not will a change require a hardfork?

Do you follow the Bitcoin "hardfork" debate?Maybe it's just drama but I think it's quite worrying that there is no consensus.

Will we find ourselves in a similar situation with Monero in a couple of years? I guess there is a hard limit on block size now. Is it big enough to support a large network? If not will a change require a hardfork?

Do you follow the Bitcoin "hardfork" debate?Maybe it's just drama but I think it's quite worrying that there is no consensus.

Will we find ourselves in a similar situation with Monero in a couple of years? I guess there is a hard limit on block size now. Is it big enough to support a large network? If not will a change require a hardfork?

There is no block size limit in XMR.

Correct, but other hard fork issues could certainly turn political. We recently had a months long discussion about changing the emission schedule, and I wouldn't rule out other such disagreements in the future.

A hard protocol-imposed block size and capacity limit is one thing we don't have to worry about.

Do you follow the Bitcoin "hardfork" debate?Maybe it's just drama but I think it's quite worrying that there is no consensus.

Will we find ourselves in a similar situation with Monero in a couple of years? I guess there is a hard limit on block size now. Is it big enough to support a large network? If not will a change require a hardfork?

There is no block size limit in XMR.

Correct, but other hard fork issues could certainly turn political. We recently had a months long discussion about changing the emission schedule, and I wouldn't rule out other such disagreements in the future.

A hard protocol-imposed block size and capacity limit is one thing we don't have to worry about.

Ok good to know, I do think emission issues are easier to understand. I personally favor as low inflation as possible. If a hard fork was made that increased the inflation I would just stop using XMR.The Bitcoin block size issue is just harder for me to comprehend. Not sure what I would do if a hard fork really happened.

Do you follow the Bitcoin "hardfork" debate?Maybe it's just drama but I think it's quite worrying that there is no consensus.

Will we find ourselves in a similar situation with Monero in a couple of years? I guess there is a hard limit on block size now. Is it big enough to support a large network? If not will a change require a hardfork?

There is no block size limit in XMR.

Correct, but other hard fork issues could certainly turn political. We recently had a months long discussion about changing the emission schedule, and I wouldn't rule out other such disagreements in the future.

A hard protocol-imposed block size and capacity limit is one thing we don't have to worry about.

Ok good to know, I do think emission issues are easier to understand. I personally favor as low inflation as possible. If a hard fork was made that increased the inflation I would just stop using XMR.

The discussion wasn't about changing the total supply or overall inflation, but about whether to have more inflation now and less later or vice versa. In any case, no such changes are being considered any more.

Quote

The Bitcoin block size issue is just harder for me to comprehend. Not sure what I would do if a hard fork really happened.

You are not alone. I don't think anyone knows what is going to happen.

I personally favor as low inflation as possible. If a hard fork was made that increased the inflation I would just stop using XMR.

At start, XMR's annualized inflation was infinite (everything else would have been a premine).

Then the inflation was very high, 1000s or 100s of % annualized, going down all the time as both the #_of_new_coins was going down (numerator) and #_of_existing_coins was going up (denominator).

The whole of last year, there was talk of normalizing the inflation so that the percentage would be more equal instead of being sky-high in the beginning, and quickly dropping and tending to 0.9%, the yearly minimum.

Metadata like OP_RETURN in bitcoin, where assets ownership changes can be associated with a transaction

much like colored coins or counterparty protocols, except on an opaque blockchain

I don't really understand what the purpose of this would be in an opaque blockchain. You could check the blockchain to confirm that... stealth address XXYY owns that thing?

I guess if you used the view key you could let others know about the colored coin, then it serves the same purpose. Yeah. Private ownership. Would be cool.

Dunno what to tell you though re: devs and documentation and no fancy news reports. I think the "problem" with monero is that its no ones full time job, because there was no pre-mine (so no one entity is hoarding 95% of available coins or whatever), and the coinage doesn't have crazy valuation right now. Its a chicken and the egg problem. Random people would put more time into developing it to make the currency more useful if it was worth more, and it would be worth more if people could do more with it.

But I'm just using that old timey thing known as patience, and trying to debug whatever I can if I can manage to build any of the development branches.

edited to add: I don't really have a full grasp of what goes on with monero, so take my opinions with a grain of salt. For instance, I just came across the monero support thread. so..... yeah.

Do you follow the Bitcoin "hardfork" debate?Maybe it's just drama but I think it's quite worrying that there is no consensus.

Will we find ourselves in a similar situation with Monero in a couple of years? I guess there is a hard limit on block size now. Is it big enough to support a large network? If not will a change require a hardfork?

There is no block size limit in XMR.

Correct, but other hard fork issues could certainly turn political. We recently had a months long discussion about changing the emission schedule, and I wouldn't rule out other such disagreements in the future.

A hard protocol-imposed block size and capacity limit is one thing we don't have to worry about.

Ok good to know, I do think emission issues are easier to understand. I personally favor as low inflation as possible. If a hard fork was made that increased the inflation I would just stop using XMR.The Bitcoin block size issue is just harder for me to comprehend. Not sure what I would do if a hard fork really happened.

moneroblocks.eu guy: (i forget who you were, and don't feel like digging through this thread):

Do you have any other plans for moneroblocks.eu?

I think it'd be awesome if you could essentially clone all of the stuff thats provided on blockchain.info for the bitcoin network.

specifically, I think it'd be awesome to have a list of active peers. or the globe representation of that would be even awesomer. The command line always gives me just an unusable list that bleeds off of my screen and its all "last active" at some point forever ago.

I'll throw 5 xmr your way to make this happen.

I just think it'd be great to see the actual depth of the network. I know there is a boatload of hash, but how many copies of the ledger are out there?

And this should reaallly be integrated into mymonero as a tab or something. I.e., how secure are my transactions if I work with monero? Oh great, here is everything on this fancy web wallet.

even cooler if this stuff is in the GUI. God I can't wait to see that. Seriously, anybody got anything I can debug (that I can actually build? dependencies are a pain if your a guy who just broke the habit of trying to ctrl+c to copy code from terminal)